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Matthew Flinders' Cat

Page 18

by Bryce Courtenay


  Billy tried to explain the relationship between himself and Ryan but soon accepted that the story told to a third person didn’t make a lot of sense. ‘His grandmother is dying and, well, his mother seems to have problems of her own. As far as I can make out, the boy has to pretty well look after both of them,’ he concluded.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Marion asked, suddenly curious, ‘His surname?’

  ‘Sanfrancesco. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Jesus, Billy!’ Marion said, alarmed. She stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray, grinding the butt. ‘Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into?’

  ‘Into? I’m not sure I know what you’re implying, my dear.’

  Marion reached for another cigarette and remained silent until she’d lit it and taken a puff. ‘Billy, the boy’s mother is dog turd!’

  Billy blinked, not sure he’d heard correctly. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘She’s a whore and a heroin addict as well as an alcoholic, the whole bag of shit, you name it!’

  Billy had half expected something like this, he’d hoped that the remarks Ryan had inadvertently made weren’t true, his comment about the circus-tent erection and blokes coming home, the references to her similarities to Billy’s own condition when he’d brought him water the first time. The two security men at St Vincent’s inquiring if his mother was all right. He’d said she was asthmatic but he’d never indicated that she was a drug addict as well.

  ‘How sad,’ Billy said, ‘How very sad for a small boy.’

  ‘Billy, ferchrissake stop! Listen to me, she’s an exotic dancer and still a very good looker, though Christ knows how she manages it. She knows everyone, all the heavies, the baddest blokes in town, if she thinks you’re interfering with her little boy, you’re dead meat!’

  Marion made a point of talking tough, it was part of the persona she worked on, male talk from a female’s mouth, but Billy could see she was deadly serious. ‘Poor little bugger,’ was all he could think to say. After a while he looked at Marion and said, ‘You know her then?’

  Marion spoke through clenched teeth, ‘Yes, I know her.’ She tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette. ‘Take my advice, Billy, stay away from the boy. She’s a nasty piece of work. Smiles like an angel but has a heart dark as hell’s gate.’

  At that moment a large, well-groomed man in a conservative grey, three-piece, pin-striped suit, a bluestriped shirt, and a tie in excruciatingly bad taste, and in complete contrast to his sartorial correctness, came up to the bar. Billy could see him in the mirror behind the bar and stared in some amazement at his choice of neckwear. The man was dressed like a senior counsel in all respects other than for his taste in ties. The pink silk tie was emblazoned with bright-purple rats.

  Marion took a hasty puff of her half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it in the ashtray. ‘Excuse me, Billy, I have to go,’ she said. She glanced at the newcomer and quickly back at Billy. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said in a half-whisper.

  ‘I’ll be on my way, then,’ Billy said, speaking to Marion’s back. ‘Thanks, Marion.’ Though he wasn’t sure if he was thanking her for her advice or simply as a courtesy. He swallowed the rest of the scotch and got down from his bar stool. He’d been so taken with the stranger’s neckwear that he’d hardly looked at his face but thought he’d seen him somewhere, a politician, someone like that, someone in the public eye anyway. Then he remembered some idle talk that Marion had a boyfriend who was some sort of politician. If this bloke was her boyfriend then he certainly made her nervous.

  Billy made his way round to the bottle shop but when almost there he turned back and hurriedly left the pub. He’d promised to visit Trevor Williams to talk about his daughter. If he was drunk, they wouldn’t let him into the ward. Billy needed to think and a bottle wasn’t going to help him sort out the mess he was in. He crossed the road and made his way up the Domain steps and back to the Botanic Gardens. His emotions threatened to overwhelm him. He had a growing sense of panic. The urge to retrace his steps to the bottle shop was tremendous. He found he was biting his lower lip. The two drinks at Marion’s Bar had barely been enough to steady his nerves after the incident with Sally Blue and the quarrel at the bank. Marion’s warning not to go near Ryan was a much larger concern. He couldn’t imagine how he’d managed to get himself into such a mess and he was afraid. He needed to stop, to think, to sit among the flowers and hear the sound of water over stone until the information whirling around in his head stopped long enough for him to make some sort of sense out of it.

  Instead of making his customary inspection, Billy made straight for his bench beside the pool, where he could sit in the shade cast by the Moreton Bay. He’d heard that if you went to a certain office in the Town Hall, they’d give you a bus ticket anywhere you wanted to go as long as it was a long way from Sydney. It was something to do with the Olympics coming in 2000, and the city fathers were testing the idea of getting all the derelicts away from the city during the Games. He could go to Surfers Paradise, stay there until the boy had forgotten about him.

  Billy went over the whole litany again, his abdication of all responsibility so that he owed nothing to anyone. He was a drunk, plain and simple, and was permitted to enjoy the rights of a drunk, which were to be completely unreliable and irresponsible. What did it matter to him whether the black man found his daughter or, more importantly, the boy was saved from a perilous future? Billy even reprimanded himself for thinking that he could make a difference or change the seemingly inevitable course of the child’s life.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, who do you think you are?’ he chided himself. If there was illness and addiction in Ryan’s family which seemed likely to lead to problems in the future, that was the concern of the Department of Community Services. This last argument, Billy knew, wouldn’t stand too much cross-examination. DOCS was known to be hopelessly inadequate and he’d recently read somewhere that it was in such a bureaucratic muddle it currently had some seven thousand reports of child neglect on its books that were uninvestigated. Almost every month in Australia a child was murdered through neglect or by a parent or a de facto while intoxicated or under the influence of drugs and usually long after the department had been made aware of the danger the child faced from repeated mistreatment or neglect. Ryan, with a mother and grandmother still alive, living under an apparently safe roof, with only a record of minor truancy and without reports of physical abuse, had no chance of even getting onto DOCS’ books.

  Billy tried to persuade himself that while Ryan’s grandmother seemed very ill, perhaps in the terminal stages of cancer, his mother obviously still cared about him and gave him money for food. While it was not perhaps the ideal situation, the boy seemed to be coping and it was well known that some heroin addicts managed their addiction for years. He’d only known the lad for a few days, far too little time to forge a strong, caring and mutual relationship, so why should he take any unnecessary risks?

  Billy had almost convinced himself that there was nothing to be concerned about except for the danger that threatened him. Derros were generally uninterested in the moral standards of society, being as they were on its fringes, but the one thing they would react to is paedophilia. They would hunt down someone in their ranks who was thought to be corrupting an innocent young boy and more than likely they would kill him. This was Billy’s first great danger. The second was, of course, the wharfies at the Flag, where he could very easily find himself wrapped in a length of anchor chain and dropped to the bottom of the harbour. And there was Marion’s warning to beware of Ryan’s mother and her associates, perhaps the greatest one to worry about.

  Billy knew that the murder of a homeless person and, in particular, an alcoholic, was of no concern to anyone. In his case it might receive a few lines tucked away in the back of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Telegraph, ‘Once-prominent barrister found dead, believed to have been murdered, the police are making inquir
ies, etc, etc, ho-bloody-hum.’

  The uncaring nature of society in general was often talked about among the homeless and by derelicts in particular. They loved to tell the story of the time during World War II when the Japanese midget submarines came into Sydney Harbour and two of them were captured. It seems the navy was concerned that they might be booby-trapped and so a bomb-explosion expert was called in to examine the wiring. However, the navy weren’t prepared to take the risk of sacrificing a valuable expert, so they sent two navy policemen up into the Domain to find a couple of derros, whom they threatened with a fate worse than death and frogmarched down to the docks, where they were made to enter the submarines with instructions to tug on wires and generally crawl about. The reward, if they made it back, was a bottle of scotch each, a commodity in very short supply during the war.

  The story had long since entered the folklore of the homeless and was often enough told for laughs among the derros. It would usually end with the statement that the navy never did come good with the scotch and, instead, substituted a kick in the arse and two bottles of cheap overproof rum. Billy had always believed that behind the laughter lay the recognition that society thought the two men weren’t worth a pinch of shit. He doubted that things had changed very much since that time. Killing him or, as in the case of Ryan’s mother, having him killed wasn’t a very big deal.

  Billy could think of no other way out of his predica ment than to take the bus out of town and decided to make inquiries at the Town Hall first thing in the morning. He’d get blotto tonight and then book himself into Foster House and the drunk tank so that he’d be safe. He told himself that the primary reason for doing this was so that Ryan wouldn’t find him in the morning. He even managed to persuade himself that, because of the complications involved, the sooner the boy was rid of him the better. If he was murdered and the story got out, as inevitably it would, it might have a far-reaching impact on the boy’s life.

  Feeling he’d at least made a decision, even though a tiny voice deep within him protested that as usual he was copping out, Billy now busied himself making poison pellets with the six slices of bread he’d garnered from the drop-in centre and shortly thereafter set out for the library steps to do his worst.

  After this, Billy crossed the Domain and made his way up Bourke Street to William and up the hill, where he turned right into Victoria Street and headed towards St Vincent’s. Passing Cesco’s, he noted that the bicycle wankers were long gone and now an altogether more ordinary-looking citizenry occupied the pavement tables and the interior. Billy purchased four Florentines, remembering how surprised he’d been to see that just about the only part of Williams that seemed not to have been injured by Casper’s mob was his mouth.

  Trevor Williams seemed both surprised and pleased to see him. ‘Gidday, Billy, how yer bin?’

  ‘Never been better,’ Billy lied, reminding himself that he was a whole heap better off than the Aborigine. He grinned down at Williams, ‘How’s the white-onwhite world treating you, old son?’

  ‘Could be worse, mate.’

  ‘Brought you a special treat,’ Billy said, resting his briefcase on the bed and reaching in for the biscuits he’d bought. ‘Florentines, fruit and nuts, a bit chewy, how’s your teeth?’

  ‘What’s left o’ them’s real good,’ Williams grinned.

  ‘When them mongrels had a go at me, all I could think was ter protect me ’ead and mouth. If I can think and sing, it don’t matter if they’ve broke me ribs and kicked me in the balls so there’s no more little Williamses gunna be runnin’ about the bush.’

  Billy placed the bag of biscuits on the locker beside the bed and noticed that a harmonica lay on it. ‘Harmonica, eh? You play the harmonica?’

  ‘Yeah, well we’re a musical family, like. Me missus was Irish and she had this real good voice, contralto, and me little daughter’s even better. I sing a bit, you know, go along, harmonisin’ and that and . . .’ he nodded his head towards the harmonica, ‘use that for the accompanying.’ Williams smiled shyly. ‘I done them a little concert in here last night.’

  ‘Concert?’

  ‘Yeah, some o’ the old bush ballads and a bit o’ country, sister says they’re all askin’ that I do it again ternight.’

  ‘Mate, that’s great, you must be feeling a bit better?’

  ‘Ribs hurt a fair bit when I’m blowin’, but it ain’t too bad.’

  ‘You say your daughter sings?’

  Williams’ eyes lit up. ‘She’s the one’s got the talent, jazz, the blues. A man don’t want ter brag, but she’s got a voice get yiz crying every time.’

  ‘Jazz, eh? I used to sing a bit myself, university revues and later at amateur concerts.’ Billy laughed. ‘More bravado than basso profundo, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yeah? You sing, eh, Billy?’ Williams was plainly delighted.

  ‘No, not any more. Now, tell me about your daughter.’

  ‘You ever heard of Billie Holiday?’ Trevor asked.

  ‘Of course, the blues, there’s never been anyone better, not even Ella, tragic life though.’

  ‘Well, that’s me daughter, the new Billie Holiday,’ Williams said proudly, then thinking Billy might feel the comparison inappropriate, hastily added, ‘Well, that’s what this Yank at the conservatorium said.’

  ‘Conservatorium? Your daughter has a trained voice?’ Realising this might sound patronising, Billy quickly added, ‘That’s unusual in a jazz singer.’

  ‘Grazier’s wife, Mrs Johnson out Wilcannia way, she heard Caroline singing when she were twelve years old and put her in for the country eisteddfod. At sixteen she gets this scholarship. Yer know, ter go ter the Adelaide Conservatorium of Music.’ Williams paused. ‘Her mum were that proud, pleased as punch, me also, mate, our own little daughter.’

  ‘Don’t blame you,’ Billy said. ‘It’s lovely when the kids turn out well.’ He’d no sooner spoken when he realised he’d made a mistake. Williams, he now remembered, had come down to Sydney to try to find his daughter, who Billy guessed was in some sort of trouble.

  The black man was silent and Billy was about to stammer an apology when Williams turned and picked up the harmonica and started to play. From the opening refrain it was immediately obvious that it was a blues number, a haunting melody that Billy thought he recognised, though he couldn’t quite place it. Trevor Williams withdrew the harmonica and started to sing in a strong and well-modulated voice.

  Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

  Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

  Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

  Williams picked up the harmonica and played the refrain, then continued singing. As his voice rose above the white curtains screening his bed, the ward grew silent. It was as if everyone held their breath so that they might hear his clean, strong voice.

  Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

  The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

  Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

  And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

  The refrain followed and then Trevor Williams continued.

  Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

  For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

  For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

  Here is a strange and bitter crop.

  A few moments of complete silence followed and someone started to clap and then more clapping followed and someone whistled, thinking the concert had started early. Billy saw that Williams was crying, silent tears running down his pocked and wind-roughened cheeks. ‘It’s her song,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Billie Holiday sung it first and then she took it up, she done it as her theme song. It’s what started all the trouble for Caroline.’ Williams grew silent, his dark blackfella eyes bloodshot and, although no sound followed, the
tears continued to slip down his cheek and onto the white sheet. ‘She’s lost,’ he whispered. ‘She don’t sing no more, she’s gorn, been took away from us by the strange and bitter crop, our little daughter.’

  The tragic song written by a New York Jewish schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, as a protest against the lynching of Negroes by white Southerners in the thirties had been turned into a different lament, a black man in search of a child who had tasted the strange fruit and had been possessed by it. Billy reached out with his left arm, his Sally Blue plaster-cast arm, his blonde-andblue-eyed smiling arm, and placed his hand on the back of the black man’s. ‘You poor bastard,’ he said quietly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Billy sat at the back of the bus going to Queensland. He’d arrived at Sydney Town Hall at ten that morning from Foster House after spending the night in the drunk tank, a windowless dormitory with twenty-six men in white beds a metre apart puking, hawking and crying out in their sleep. Although he had money in his pocket and could have afforded scotch the previous night, he’d chosen a cheap ’n’ nasty cask of moselle designed to put him off the air as quickly as possible. He’d taken the cask to where he knew the Mission Beat van would call and by midnight they’d dropped him, legless and forlorn, at Foster House. It was the only way he could face the prospect of spending the night in the safety and horror of a roomful of his own kind.

  Cliff Thomas, the Salvation Army major in charge of Foster House, had given Billy the number of the office at the Town Hall to apply for a travel voucher. The office was the last in a row down a long, brown, polished corridor with the word ‘Travel’ hastily scribbled on a temporary sign outside it. Billy stopped to unlock the handcuff around his wrist before knocking. ‘Come!’ a voice called out. He entered to see a large, red-faced man seated behind a desk.

  Billy stopped, unsure whether to approach. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  The official didn’t return his greeting but looked him over carefully before indicating the vacant chair opposite him. Without further preliminaries he asked, ‘Where to? Perth? Alice Springs? Not Tasmania, there’s no bus to Tasmania.’

 

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